In the summer of 1894 after John Dewey – American pragmatist,
educator, and labor advocate – was appointed chair of philosophy at
the University of Chicago, he took the train ride from Ann Arbor,
Michigan to Chicago. He barely made it. Eugene Debs and the
American Railway Union had effectively shut down all rail traffic
west of Chicago, and the only way into the city was on trains
without Pullman sleeping cars attached to them. After Debs was
arrested and the strike broken, Dewey wrote to his wife Alice, then
in Europe on vacation, that the strike and all its violence had
indeed accomplished something: It had gotten “the social organism
thinking” (Menand 297).

This anecdote encapsulates thematically John …

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